This game started off so strong and it was going well for a while but over time the novelty of it just felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again. This game is too much longer than the original Luigi's Mansion and I think that actually hurts it more than it helps, where as the original was just short enough to not be tiresome but just long enough to feel complete. I sadly felt disappointed with how this game feels dull and how unmemorable it is. I couldn't be bothered to finish this.

I am so conflicted on this game. On one hand it's about a queer roadtrip to defeat fascism, on the other hand, I absolutely cannot get into the combat at all.

For the most part I really enjoy the writing. That meme about writers who use subtext being cowards is totally relevant here.

I particularly enjoyed Act III for diving deep into Sam's psyche. I ran out of steam in Act IV, the final part of the game, against the final boss no less.

The combat system is... very weird to me. I've heard that it's like FFXIII, but as someone who hasn't played many FF games, this doesn't help me at all.

The tutorial is pretty short, and by Act III I had played the game so poorly I soft locked myself. See, I was like 4 levels below the boss I was trying to fight, so they literally instant killed all of my party members constantly, and I didn't have enough money to buy gas so I could keep grinding to level up. This game is weirdly a resource management game with the money in a way I've never felt so oppressed by before. I genuinely had to restart the game from Act I because I had been foolish enough to repeatedly save in the same slot, despite the game offering like 50 save slots or something.

So the second time around I minmaxed leveling as hard as I could... without making myself completely out of money since I could mess up the game again. AND I turned on Story Mode combat difficulty. Which, frankly I find the name a bit offensive. It's not like you can simply button mash your way thru boss encounters on that level, at least not the final one. See, the upgrade system is the whole way you level up, and there's lot of spells and if you don't read them all very carefully you can end up with a pretty shit build. I think that's what happened to me at some point and it was making the game a lot harder.

Sadly, the encounter rate just gets too high, and it literally interrupts party dialogue. Gracefully the game resumes conversations where you left off, but I found myself dreading the interruptions. Even on Story Mode where you apparently get more money, I constantly was running out of money for upgrades if i wanted to keep enough money to not run out of gas and lose the entire game.

Eventually I just looked up a Lets Play to watch the final boss play out. Also, apparently at some point the game was patched to prevent you from using your entire item collection during fights, because it was considered messy/confusing. As far as I can tell this was a massive nerf to your combat ability. You have to constantly remember to restock the items in your 5 slots, and it's hard to balance which items you want to take to each fight. In particular Act III and Act IV bosses have some items you really want to have around and I had to restart both fights because I hadn't taken the right loadout.

Anyways, the writing is definitely cheesy at times, but I like the parallels to fascism, LGBT rights, and ineffective liberal government "status quo" woes. Oh, and all the stuff about social media in Act III again was great.

Sadly, my lasting thought about this game is that it needs a massive balance tuning. Maybe I'm "bad" at the game or something, but it just didn't click and I kept feeling frustrated. I wish this game had just been a visual novel instead.

It's sad realizing this is where the series peaks and it won't get any better than this.

In my youth, Pokemon was a pretty big thing for me, though I never played the games in the same trajectory as my peers. While many of the kids around me were on the GBA releases, I was on the original GameBoy and GBC, courtesy of a cousin who gave me those games and a GameBoy color for free (items I still have and cherish to this day). It wasn't until I had begged and pleaded my parents to buy me Pokemon Diamond the year it came out that I ever got to play a title while it was "fresh." I justified the $40 purchase from my parents - which they remarked was very hard on them to justify that much for a video game considering how hard they were hit by the financial crisis of the time; plugging away at it day after day going beyond the endgame, and even meeting friends through the online service, obtaining a few rad (and many hacked) Pokemon. Diamond is where I would drop off, though. With my family refusing to nab me Platinum because they said "I already had that game," I fell off naturally as I couldn't keep up. That is why returning to the series years later, with copies bestowed upon me from a good friend and some smart pawn shop purchases a while ago, has meant a lot to me.

For a long while I had heard about what I missed out on from the fifth Pokemon generation. I was lumped in with the group of naive haters that hadn't even played the game, giving it shit for no good reason. "The designs suck," "it looks old," and the eventual "it's just a game for dumb babies" were insults lugged by me and many others; I cannot be happier to eat crow on those words I said so long ago.

Pokemon Black has its fair share of issues, but as a standalone, single-player experience, it is the series in top form. To start, it's a blessing that Black bucked the trend of the time of increasing the scale and scope of the included Pokemon by forcing the player to engage with entirely new creatures. This was very controversial, but seeing how the rest of the series pans out, it's refreshing to not have Pidgeys shoved down your throat everywhere, and had to learn a new way to party build. I felt genuine challenge prepping up for unpredictable fights with Pokemon I did not - or just barely - recognize. Obviously not every visual design is a winner. Every Pokemon generation has its fair share of wonderful designs and bottom of the kindergarten trashbin. Generation 5's boldness to force you to use these new Mons actually made me fall in love with a few I had issues with previously, and turned me onto ones I hadn't known were from this generation/ones I just hadn't seen at all. It was exhilarating to try new things and focus on new strategies unlike the usual party formation/brute force that has gotten me through all of the entries to this point.

Black's difficulty ebbs and flows in a mostly natural way, balancing well despite a few new curveballs put into the gym structure we used to know. Gyms swapping their predicted types around and constructing a new elite four/champion structure gave a new, welcomed sense of difficulty for the most part. Leading up to the eighth gym badge, the game kept a natural curve going that was tough but manageable. Sadly, the final stretch to the elite four dropped the ball and became a 5+ hour grind fest that turned me off from exploring further. Finally rolling credits felt hard-earned, but not entirely for the reasons I had hoped. I would have preferred the ending of this experience not having featured a several hour-long Durant farming spree.

Loading the game back up and beginning to engage with the endgame content also turned me off from playing further. Trainer levels rapidly increasing and wild Pokemon hovering in significantly lower levels turned me off from the further grind. I understand that these games are made to maximize your investment, and if I was 12 years old playing this fresh, I gladly would have 100%'d Black like I did with Diamond back in the day. This just isn't structured for a busy adult who wants to play these games but doesn't want to commit their life to them, and that's okay.

The overall presentation of Black is where it stands the strongest besides its revamped game structure. The new music tracks are some of the hardest in the series, and many of the new locations are beautiful for such antiquated hardware of the time. It can still feel a little puzzling why a first-party DS release came out so late in its lifecycle, but it's undeniable how much effort was poured into the audio/visual presentation: animated Pokemon models, massive 3D structures, triple rotation battles, and a greater sense of elevation; Pokemon has not looked or sounded this good up to this point.

Naturally, when concluding my time with this game, I had to transfer the Pokemon I acquired through SoulSilver and Diamond into Black, and said process sucks. Having the six monster transfer limit at a time is a pain but is only amplified with this antiquated touch-screen mini-game where you have to re-catch your Pokemon over again. I suppose this is a far faster way to acquire your old Pokemon than Diamond's pseudo-safari zone, but it's arguably less fun. I have already moved these old Pokemon from Black to Bank and now Home to remove the temptation of using them in any of the further titles. Going through the process of moving all of these Pokemon has been cathartic to reach a point where all the PC boxes are now connected and you no longer have to play garbage arcade games to move pitiful amounts of creatures around at a time.

I may emulate Black/White 2 at some point in the future, but I want to continue on with the physical cartidges I have for the rest of the generations. As I said earlier, it's bittersweet that this is considered the series peak, and my expectations are pretty low for the following few titles. I would hope that some point in the future, Game Freak (or a third party studio who has the budget and gives a damn) can produce a loving remake of this game, and remind people why this generation is as reveered as it is. My only regret here is just that I did not get to this game sooner, especially while it was relevant so I could've used all of its C-Gear features and accessing the browser game to transfer unique versions of old Pokemon.